Franco-Turkish Mine Kirikkanat is a tireless defender of secularism

Mine Kirikkanat, a novelist and editorialist for the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet, is the target of a violent slander campaign by the ultra-conservative daily Yeni Akit, which accuses her of insulting Islam and Muslims.

Her home is an elegant apartment on the second floor of a building in the Moda neighbourhood, a secular bastion of Istanbul located on the Asian side of the Bosphorus.

It’s hard to imagine Mine Kirikkanat living anywhere else. A sociologist who specializes in the history of religions, the 66-year-old Franco-Turkish journalist and novelist is a tireless defender of the republic and of secularism.

A correspondent in France for over 20 years and an editorialist at the daily Cumhuriyet, she has already faced about 40 lawsuits for her writings.

A few days after the attempted coup d’état of July 2016, in the height of the wave of arrests of opponents of the regime, she had admitted to La Croix that she had double-locked her door to have the time to contact her attorney in case the police came for her.

But today the threat comes from a different quarter.

For declaring that she adores Kemal Atatürk, founder of the republic and father of Turkish secularism, Mine Kirikkanat has been the target of a violent campaign of slander by the ultraconservative Yeni Akit daily. The paper accuses her of insulting Islam and Muslims.

“I said I adore Atatürk, just as I adore Marlon Brando in the movies,” said the writer, who has often been branded a hardline Kemalist. It's a label she rejects.

“Ten years ago, I was not a fervent admirer of Atatürk, whom I criticized just as I criticized all who cherished him,” she said. “But the Republic and Atatürk are insulted so much today that we have an obligation to defend him. That’s why I began to say Atatürk was my idol,” she explained.

That has earned her the current hate campaign and, even worse, a good dozen death threats. “Two of them are being taken very seriously, mainly because they refer to a verse of the Quran that calls for death for those who commit apostasy,” she said.

Mine Kirikkanat says she has not left her house for three days now. She has taken legal action, but is not overly optimistic.

“We have no hope that this will result in anything; it’s above all to leave a place in History in case there were to be an attack against me,” she said.

She feels the death threats against her illustrate the extreme polarization in Turkey, especially between lay persons and clerics.

“This example shows that you can no longer be even gently provocative,” she said. “You can now no longer criticize Islam, you can no longer say anything that is not compatible with Islam.”

For now, Mine Kirikkanat will continue to fight.

“If I manage to push back this press that is lynching me, there is hope,” she said, “but if they continue to go after me, I’m going to think of leaving this country. I’m not suicidal.”

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